How many times have you ever had to go back
and check test logs for when something was tested last time? You might if an
error occurs in production, but the only benefit you will get is probably who
to blame for forgetting something. Dale Carnegie (author of “How To Win Friends
And Influence People, 1936”)didn’t think that was a good idea, and me neither.
People who screw up usually know when they have done so and feel pretty bad
when they do.
A few years back, I started to use
something we called documented exploratory testing as the sole way of testing
our services.
It's simply exploratory testing with the addition of notes. The
tester writes down some notes during his testing, and saves them to our "test
log folder". Any tester is using notes while testing a rather large and
complicated service, on paper or other media his or she prefers. These
notes serve a testing log for us, and help us check of the traceability “requirement”.
By doing this we can focus on actual testing, and “skip” the paperwork, and
that’s a lot more fun.
